October 15, 1998

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

hen Anne Fadiman was growing up, she writes in her endearing collection of essays, "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," her family
"viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament."

She and her older brother would vie to see who could find the longest words; she writes that he won "with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde," the word for "a smelly chemical that we used to sing to the tune of 'The Irish Washerwoman.'
"

With their parents, both writers, they used to compete with the contestants on the old weekly television program "G.E. College Bowl," a quiz show in which two teams of four students, each representing a different college, competed
for scholarship money. Calling themselves Fadiman U., she admits with some chagrin, "in five or six years of competition, we lost only to Brandeis and Colorado College."

The four of them, "compulsive proofreaders," loved to catch people's mistakes in print. "I know what you may be thinking," she writes: "What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging
little busybodies!" But she's really just being polite here in the same way as when she berates herself for once proofreading a paperback edition of Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" and sending her list of misprints to
the author, who surely must have been grateful. (She reports that Vera Evseevna Nabokov wrote to thank her on her husband's behalf for her "thoughtfulness.")

Besides, Fadiman can't help herself. As she writes, her urges are probably genetic. She was bound to her destiny, being the child of Clifton Fadiman, an editor, anthologist, book reviewer and former judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club,
and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, a World War II correspondent with Time magazine and the co-author, with Theodore H. White, of "Thunder Out of China," a 1946 best seller on China's role in World War II. She has been
compelled to read omnivorously and to write "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1997.

J. Ross Baughman/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Anne Fadiman

As for "Ex Libris," whatever moved her to write the 18 essays gathered in it, they deal usefully with little problems people who care for books would be unlikely to think about systematically, let alone discuss with other readers and writers.
For instance, in "Marrying Libraries," she explains how she and her husband, also a writer, became truly wed only when, after much sorting, categorizing and compromising, they had merged their book collections.

In "Never Do That to a Book," she identifies those who revere books physically and are therefore believers in "courtly love," and those who underline, make marginal notes, tear pages out or keep reading books until they
fall apart, and are thus believers in "carnal love." She allows that the world has room for both.

In "Words on a Flyleaf," she considers what to do if you should find in a secondhand shop a book you've inscribed to a friend. When Shaw once came across one of his books, inscribed "To -- -- -- -- with esteem, George Bernard
Shaw," he bought the book and returned it to -- -- -- -- , adding the line, "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."

And in "Eternal Ink," she considers how writers might record ideas that occur to them when they are not at their desks. "One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly
leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow's blood, and captured the sentence."

When she is not addressing practical matters, she is merely very charming, whisking us up odd literary byways -- like the sonnet writing of William Kunstler, the late radical defense lawyer, or a theory that the scarcity of first editions
of "Alice in Wonderland" can be accounted for by the fact that so many of them were eaten by children.

First published in slightly different form in a column called "The Common Reader," written by Fadiman for Civilization magazine, these essays also breathe new life into such seemingly tired subjects as reading aloud, secondhand books,
plagiarism and how children regard their parents' libraries. (Fadiman reports that her daughter thought that John Updike's "Rabbit at Rest" was a story about "a sleepy bunny.")

Her purpose in writing them was to go to what she considers the heart of reading: "not whether we wish to purchase a new book but how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for years, the ones whose
textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children's skin."

In "Ex Libris" Fadiman has produced a smart little book that one can happily welcome into the family and allow to start growing old.